Unacceptable Risk (41 page)

"How are we doing with the scan? It should be a simple matter to trace the IP addresses on Benoit's last e-mail." Jill stood over Grogg while he typed with amazing speed, running through all manner of queries on Big Brain. Sam was watching as well over the video monitor in New York. They were working on two vital puzzles at once. One was the whereabouts of Benoit Moreau.

"I can't believe I have to ask a computer where Gaudet has taken Benoit," Sam said.

"Oh, come on, Sam, give me a break. We did the best we could. Besides, the idea was to get her in with Gaudet, not keep her out." Jill was unusually tense because, like everyone else, she was afraid for Benoit and she knew the stakes.

"I'm sure we did that. She's in him, he's in her... in out, in out."

"Grogg, don't be such a prick," Jill snapped.

Grogg smiled wickedly, and Sam shook his head.

"You two have almost achieved domestic bliss," Sam said. "Next you start marriage counseling."

"Forgive a guy a little levity, huh," said Grogg. "You know if this goes bad, it's gonna be hell. You think your portfolio sucked after the last attack...."

"People are gonna die," Jill said.

"I know that, damn it. Shit."

There was silence for a while as they waited. No one was saying a word about the second item on their minds. Sam and Jill were waiting to see if Grogg's latest attempt to break into Gaudet's Cordyceps Windows folder would succeed.

"Damn, it disappeared again."

"Oh crap," Jill said.

"I gotta try the next idea," Grogg said.

"How's the work on the antivirus coming?" Sam asked.

"I've got twenty people in a contractor's shop working on it, along with four of our own. It's based on the assumption that they get in through Windows SMB/CIFS. I have made a lot of other assumptions. Like what I would do if I were an evil genius."

"Instead of just Grogg?" Jill patted his head.

A phone rang in LA.

"It's the FBI," Jill said, putting the call through to Sam in New York.

"This is Ernie."

"The director isn't into this yet?" Sam said.

"I'm the designated Sam expert. Around here they think you're a little crazy. They do take the threat seriously, on the one hand, but on the other, there isn't any evidence that anything is going to happen. Obviously, Gaudet is selling out to the French government, but maybe the Cordyceps thing is a hoax to hold the price up."

"Maybe. Let's hope so."

"But you don't think so."

"I think it's real."

"Our scientists don't think this can be delivered as easily as anthrax and the DNA in the vector would be damaged in the irradiation of the mail."

"Nobody says he has to send it through the mail."

"The CIA is considering destroying Gaudet's entire facility in Quatram. Defense, of course, would love to lend a missile or two," Ernie commented.

"Good idea. That way you can destroy Gaudet's main server, thereby making it impossible for Grogg to break in and read the Cordyceps files." It was a rare moment of sarcasm for Sam, but he was losing patience with the government's nonsense.

"Yeah, well, the State Department will like that argument. They aren't as fond of blowing things up. Arab countries tend to take issue."

"Tell them to wait until after we hack into the computer."

"When I tell them this, they'll want the CIA to try hacking in."

"That'll be good. They hire us to do that sort of thing, but now with millions of lives at stake, they want to learn. Tell them to do their hacking and rocketing after we access the computer."

"You gotta understand, Sam, this Cordyceps is like a bogeyman that's everywhere and nowhere. We have no intelligence on it except what you dig up. The French claim they don't know anything about it. They're just buying technology that they already own—that's according to them."

Sam thought briefly of Figgy, whose voice had been oddly absent of late.

"I understand the frustration. I guess you can tell we're not too happy either."

"What do you think we should do?"

"Check every delivery system for the vector that you can think of. Check everybody coming into the country. Especially Mexico and Canada. Look for mercenaries, not terrorists. These people are not likely to be Arab or French. This is a money deal."

"How in the hell do you profile people like that?" Ernie was exasperated.

"You're the expert on that. Not to mention that you have the invaluable assistance of customs and the border patrol. While you're at it, you might consider shutting down all private aviation until we sort this out. Also look for phony government aircraft that could be used as a delivery mechanism. Lastly, if you'd like more good news, I'm guessing that the people who will deliver Cordyceps are already in the country."

"You know we don't have enough evidence to shut down private aviation. People will go nuts if we don't find anything."

"You are exactly right. If we don't find anything, hundreds of thousands of people are going to go nuts and start killing people. So let me get back to what I'm doing. If we find out anything, I'm sure we'll need all the manpower of the federal government. Until then... I've made my suggestions."

"They want you at a meeting."

"Put some Tilok war paint on your face and go in my place. Either that or arrest me. I'm busy."

"Sam... the government pays you...."

"So put a stop payment on my check." Sam sighed. "We can video-conference if you must."

"Fine. One more thing. I ran this antivirus thing up the flagpole, and even though they are paying to build it, they think releasing gazillions of antiviruses on the Internet is way too risky. The cure could be worse than the disease. It's never been done. It's not tested. Off the record, they are going to say no. And whatever you do, don't release it without permission from Homeland Security. I think they have their own ideas."

"Hey, look at it this way, Ernie. We're on orange alert. What could go wrong with such vigilance?" Sam didn't bother commenting on the fact that the government was now apparently paying for an Internet antivirus that they were certain they would never use. It didn't matter, because Sam figured he might use it anyway.

"Our government does a good job," Ernie said.

"For a government it does. But it is a government."

"I've heard enough."

"No, no, Ernie, don't go away. I need your help."

"Sam needs the government?"

"Uh-huh."

"What for?"

"I want to go talk to Benoit Moreau and you could be of assistance."

Jill's mouth dropped at that one.

"And how might you do that if neither you nor the U.S. government has the faintest clue where she is? Somewhere in the U.S., I believe you said?"

"Well, actually, I've narrowed it down a little. Let me off the line for just a second." Sam put Ernie on hold. "Jill, I know you like to hear things first."

Even on the video monitor Jill looked like an egg would fry nicely on her forehead.

"I also had a team following Benoit."

"I was in charge of that," Jill responded.

"You were. And you did an excellent job. But I had a radio locator device."

"You said that was too dangerous."

"It was. That's why she had to drop it shortly after she left the train. But we had her long enough. I wanted both teams to be completely independent. This way, because they didn't know about each other, they were. Can I do something to win back your goodwill?"

"I'll give it some thought."

"Now that I've told you, I guess we better tell Ernie because we're a little tight on time." They conferenced Ernie back on the line: "Ernie, I believe I've narrowed it down a little, but you have to promise this is off the record."

"There's no such thing anymore."

"Okay. I'll call a rent-a-cop."

"You can't do that."

"Where in the Constitution does it deny me my right of free association and free speech?"

"All right, all right. It's not off the record, I just didn't hear it."

"I need you to call the St. Regis Hotel, the housekeeping department, and tell them I'm a government contractor and whatever else you have to tell them to get their full and silent cooperation."

"Just tell me one thing and, of course, I never heard it."

"And how's that different than off the record?"

"Quit being a wiseass. What room?"

"2004."

"Is that a joke?"

"Coincidence."

"Damn," Ernie said, and hung up.

Jill still looked pissed.

"Grogg thought of dropping the transmitter."

"Don't blame Grogg, you dirty rat bastard," Jill said. "I knew there was a reason I never married you."

"There was. It was my stupidity."

"So, tell me what happened!"

"We knew she went behind some small shops. They took her out of Grand Central in a crate. Once we knew about where she was ... Well... how many huge crates come out of small shops in Grand Central? The crate was one of several suspicious activities that we checked on. We followed it to the hotel and used off-duty cops to check it out. They narrowed it down to a particular floor from staff who saw a crate, and then we got a match for Benoit with a description of a woman in one of the rooms from one of the maids."

"And that's it? Why were we trying to trace the e-mail?"

"Confirmation never hurts."

"He could be torturing her, Sam. Millions could die. Why confirmation? Why not storm the place and see what she knows?"

"Because she doesn't want to come out until she knows enough about Cordyceps to stop it. She signed up to be a hero. You take her out too soon and we may lose the whole war."

A departed lover is worse than a rotting tooth.

—Tilok proverb

The gray mist hung in the trees and lay over the water, just fitting in the channel as if cotton placed by loving hands. The mountains were steep and sprinkled with oak and mixed conifers. Michael had read about them but had not seen them since childhood, and his fascination was keen.

Although it had been only three days since the meeting in Central Park he was disappointed that he had heard nothing about any capture of Gaudet.

Frederick, a mule on loan from a local hunting outfitter, seemed bored with the mountain and clearly wanted the oats that were his due every time he made the bottom or the top. It was a bit of mule psychology that Michael had learned from the owner.

Yodo was in a good mood this morning and had actually made a little conversation on the way down.

"A very good place," he had said, followed by a few comparisons with the Hokkaido Forest in Japan. It was a speech for Yodo. Yodo's succinct approach to communication suited Michael fine. The best thing about Yodo was not what he said but the way he occasionally smiled. It carried a hint of irony that Michael found appealing.

This morning it helped in only a small way with the melancholy inside him. The disappointment of losing Grady would linger and he was still affected by Marita's death and the loss of Eden, his wife. Things could come together in the mind like ocean waves that mount one upon the other.

He had seen the desert in summer and it seemed a very tired place and he thought of it now. When his father had taken him, it was parched and had become like an old face, the deep lines in the clay running out everywhere and nowhere, for good reasons, but not according to any predetermination that a man could explain; the moisture of it was blown away, leaving only grit and subtle shadings of warm colors that blended easily with no line between the brown, the tan, and the gold. His soul had become like the desert, and Grady had become the white cloud forming against the incessant blue—she made him see promise of an end and a beginning; new rain that turned the soil alive and the air sweet, the restoring of the arid terrain.

Now she was gone.

They were down in a deep canyon on the Wintoon River in northern California. One thousand feet above them ran a two-lane asphalt road and at their feet, two hundred yards below, the river frothed in a deep rock canyon. Michael pondered the cable stretched across the river, a good one hundred feet off the water at its lowest point. On the far side there was a bluff and a flat two-acre area with two log houses, one with several rooms and one a cabin.

The bluff was bordered on two sides by the intersection of two rivers at right angles, the Wintoon and Salmon rivers. There was no feasible way to access Michael's new home except a white-water trip in a kayak or a long, torturous hike down the mountain and then a boat ride across the river or a hand-pull on a cable-suspended cart. Unless one crossed the gorge suspended from the cable, any other access across the river entailed scaling a cliff to Michael's plateau. To Michael, this meant protection, but Sam had been concerned about the sheer number of hiding places and the difficulties of security in any forest environment. Still, it was much better than New York, and since Michael was a free man, he decided that this would be his home. For now. It was a primitive place. Michael could feel the wildness here that he loved so well. California, even some of the remote parts, could get a bit crowded, but this area was not well traveled once you moved more man one hundred yards off the highway. Michael's home's location eliminated all but the most determined. Tourists wouldn't make it down the trail, much less across the river, unless they wanted to try their hands at white-water swimming in a cold river.

This place was called an inholding. It was surrounded by national forest and the government had wanted to buy it. Their only problem was that the white-haired gentleman who had owned the place cared only a little for money, loved his land, and hated the government. It was a formula that brought Michael his new home. Old and tired, the owner had been hauled off by his only child, a daughter, more or less against his will—even if his shackles were the bonds of love. Now, a few days after first laying eyes on the place, Michael was moving in.

The cable car was actually a flatbed with no sides. Michael and Yodo loaded his stuff and Michael tried to summon his old enthusiasm. The donkey had carried his two hundred pounds and Yodo, about 125. Michael's wounds were still healing so he carried only his camera and notepad. They hobbled Frederick, gave him oats and hay, and Michael climbed aboard the flatbed of the cable car to pull his way across the two hundred feet. It was easy to see why the realtor refused even to consider making the trip and had listed the property without ever setting foot on it.

Once on the other side Michael sent the cart back for Yodo and began hauling the two hundred pounds of stuff into his new home. He would make twenty or thirty such trips to move in, but he didn't mind. Solitude was worth a great deal. He realized that he had become a bit of a recluse. In the Amazon, in recent times, silent visits from Marita had been plenty, so long as he had his weekly trips to Angamos to play his Quena flute with the Red Howler band. Around these parts a car went by every five or ten minutes, but they were a thousand feet above him. On his side of the Salmon River one had to ascend over five thousand feet and travel a good distance back to get to the nearest wilderness area trail—all perfectly satisfactory.

For a while Sam's men would be keeping him company. The revelations concerning the law firm had brought disturbing news about the lengths to which some would go to have the secret of the Chaperone. He had delivered the phony journal as promised, mainly to help Georges and Benoit, of whom he'd quickly grown fond. He had invited Raval to come and stay here once his spy days were over. Evidently, Raval's spy days were short-lived, because he had already arrived. Michael looked forward to the day when the technology entered the public domain and they would no longer have to wear Kevlar.

Although he was volunteering to be the bait, he wondered if Sam hadn't happily shuttled him off to a secret life in California to get rid of him and to keep him safe. At least here, he and Georges could pore over the Chaperone papers in relative safety. One day, perhaps soon, Raval would tell him everything he knew. It would be fascinating to understand. In the meantime, Sam said, focus on staying alive.

"Your chin is practically on your desk," Jill said. Grady was nursing a cup of coffee. Jill pulled up a chair.

"I'm lost. I broke up with Clint last night."

"You only told him last night? You left him long before that."

"Why am I this way?"

"The reason now lives in the north of our great state, back in the mountains on the Wintoon River."

"I want to be with him."

"The problem is that Gaudet may be watching him. He must know that you're important to Bowden. Do you want to go through that all over again?"

"I understand the reasoning. But I don't have to like it. I just wonder if Gaudet would be right about the 'important' thing. Michael hasn't called or written."

"For God's sake, he thinks you have a boyfriend."

"So what do I do?"

"Sam would say suffer for the time being, but maybe you could write him."

"I want to see him just for a day or two. That's all. Then I can write. I could disguise myself as a boy or whatever."

"Where you gonna hide your chest?"

"Very funny."

"I'll talk to Sam. Maybe a short visit, hair under your hat. We're trying to get a government helicopter to scour the mountain with infrared so we'll know if someone's watching. If Sam says okay, take everything you could conceivably need. It's miles from nowhere."

"I'm not just gonna say howdy and have sex," Grady said, catching Jill's drift immediately.

The okay from Sam came more quickly than Grady could have imagined. Sam liked the effect she had on Michael and that, she was told, was the only reason. This was the one time in Grady's life that she had packed in fifteen minutes. It was because the flight departed in two and a half hours. She landed in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and took the 8:30 A.M. flight to Eureka. There she rented a car and got soaked in a gray rain that seemed dismal enough that even the dogs looked wet and depressed with their hair plastered to their ribs. The sky was everywhere and nowhere, blurring the green of the trees and reminding her that this was also a rain forest but in the cold, without the womblike warmth of Amazonia.

She drove into the town of McKinleyville and bought a poncho, some gloves, and a stocking cap. She already had a warm coat. Then she drove into the mountains. Nothing had really prepared her for this, having spent most of her life in LA. She had gone on family vacations but they stayed at resorts and recreation areas in the south of the state or they went back east with money from Aunt Anna for what her mother called cultural experiences. Camping was never suggested or undertaken, so she knew the vast stretches of mountains and forests that were in the West only through books and television, and they did not convey the feel of the place.

From the plane it had become apparent that California had far more trees than people. Behind the so-called redwood curtain lay miles of rugged, mountainous forest land that was largely unknown to the public. To go there from anyplace that anybody ever heard of, you had to fly in small planes or drive winding two-lane roads.

From Eureka she drove nearly an hour and a half into the mountains, past rivers that cut gorges thousands of feet below the mountaintops. She noticed that the water was crystalline, clean enough to scrub the soul. Trees were massive along the road and there were mosses and vines and all manner of green that she could not name. She had never seen anything like it and she found herself stopping the car and looking into the forest. There were bracken ferns like those she had seen around rural areas, one of the few plants she recognized. The conifers felt so strong and ancient that she got out of the car almost without thinking, as if drawn by sorcery. It was now near freezing and rain had turned to heavy mist, so she grabbed a GORE-TEX parka.

She walked to the forest's edge and looked, straining to see like a child peeking in a stranger's house. She stepped in among the trees. There was brush, but not much. The forest actually looked fairly open. Back nearer the coast, she recalled, it was more dense. Here the lower trunks were clear of branches and grayish green brush had grown up. Moments ago she had been in a rush, intent on being with Michael Bowden, but in this place of quiet and wild, where things were more timeless, it seemed a few minutes wouldn't matter. For a while she wandered down a gentle hill, enjoying the unfamiliar mystique of the forest. When next she stopped, she heard a stream and walked on to investigate. What she found was a series of beautiful pools a few feet across and vigorous cascades running between them.

The moss was almost effervescent and the grasses lush. The rocks were white and speckled and, even in the deep of the pools, the water was translucent and small green trout were vividly outlined, the black speckles of their backs plain. Something about the place made her shiver, but it wasn't the cold. Nor was it fear.

A very large tree attracted her attention and she walked to its base. She wondered if it might be a Douglas fir. Sam had told her long ago how the species was named after a Scotsman, a Mr. David Douglas, who was the first white man to publicize its existence. Instead of asking the Indians the tree's name, it was named after Douglas. The forest floor all around looked soft and thick with old needles.

She sat and watched the pools, and in a few moments there was a
whirr
sound and she realized that a large bird had landed in a nearby tree and she could just see the branches bobbing. On the tree that might be a Douglas fir, there was a giant fungus that looked mushroomlike. She wondered at its age. Something made her suspect that such a fungus would grow very slowly. She wondered how big the tree was on the date of her birth and realized that it had probably changed very little in the last twenty years. She couldn't imagine how old it might be. She imagined bringing Michael to this place and having him explain about the tree, the fungus, and the creatures. Surely, if he had been in these woods only a few days, he would know more than she might ever learn. She knew he was like that.

Near her shoe she spied a small salamander and farther away a chipmunk running over the litter on the ground like a picky shopper at a fruit stand.

Things were so different in the world of men than in the world of giant trees and quiet streams. A couple of weeks earlier, she thought, she might at least consider spending the rest of her life with a working stiff making babies. Then something strange had happened: Michael Bowden had come along.

The tree was not like her life. It never moved.

For a moment she thought she might be nuts sitting here in a forest several hundred miles from her home. This trip could leave her feeling very foolish. She was in love with a man who lived in her mind and now she was on a mission to discover if something in this world, one Michael Bowden in the flesh, might roughly match the man in her head. Of course she realized there was another possibility and that was that maybe he was different from her fantasies but nevertheless destiny's truly intended. Where love was concerned even the most cynical corners of her mind had to yield to a little magic. Looking at the fungus and the tree and the enchantment of the stream, the barely visible sky above, she felt truly insignificant. Still, somehow, people and their thoughts of her and her thoughts of them made her life important because most of mankind seemed bound by some metaphysical strangeness sometimes called consciousness or love, and if there was anything else out there in the great beyond, it might also be subject to this same love and this same self-awareness.